


Something Not Quite Ordinary

by Signel_chan



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Children, F/M, Family, child fails to understand that he can still be loved even if there is another child around, having a best friend that's adopted causes a lot of understanding problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:46:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25510801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Signel_chan/pseuds/Signel_chan
Summary: The life of a nine-year-old son to a famous pianist and a busy detective could never be marked as "ordinary", even if he doesn't realize that's the case. After all, he is still subject to the various problems having two very loving parents can bring forth.written for the Saimatsu Gift Exchange!
Relationships: Akamatsu Kaede/Saihara Shuichi, Harukawa Maki/Momota Kaito
Comments: 1
Kudos: 25





	Something Not Quite Ordinary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sachi_Grace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sachi_Grace/gifts).



Daiki Saihara led a rather ordinary life, or at least as ordinary of a life the nine-year-old son of a famous pianist and a busy detective could possibly be. He spent a lot of time going from school to different practice halls or concerts, or occasionally to his father’s office to sit while he was working on cases, and sometimes if he was lucky he’d get picked up by one of his parents’ friends and go to their house instead, either forced to sit and listen to conversations that went over his head or to play with kids that he’d grown up with for the most part. Not knowing that most children his age weren’t always in that position, he thought it rather strange whenever he’d hear his classmates talk about family dinners and game nights, because his idea of family bonding was when they’d all be in the crowd at a concert, or when he’d fall asleep on his father’s lap listening to his mother play the piano softly.

No, he had no real idea of how unordinary his life actually was, but there wasn’t much that could be done to explain it to him, because the adults in his life knew it was best to let him keep living in his bubble of innocence. There wasn’t any reason to let him know that he was rather privileged, that he got to do things and go places that most kids his age did not have access to, because he was well-adjusted to things as they were and he didn’t need to begin to suspect he was possibly _better_ than his classmates.

That didn’t exclude him from having to go through the blows that having loving parents could give him, though, and he experienced his first real devastation with them a few months after his ninth birthday and they couldn’t allow him to go to a classmate’s birthday party, despite the child who’d invited him having come to his. “Why can’t I go?” he asked, pleading with his whine. “She came to mine, I should go to hers!”

“We already have plans that weekend, you can’t miss what we’ll be doing for a birthday party,” his mother replied, not enjoying seeing the devastation in her son’s eyes that mirrored her own, watching him begin to tear up as he grabbed at his dark hair and began pulling on it. “But you know what? When you see why we’re going to be gone, you’ll understand why you should be with us instead of at her party.”

“I’ll talk to her father after I drop you off at school in the morning,” his father added, trying not to look at the pitiful display the boy was putting on. “We’ll work something out so that you can spend time with her a different day, to make up for it. What we’re doing isn’t something we can miss, and even if you could not be there, there’d be no one to watch you.”

Beginning to huff as he was feeling like he wasn’t being listened to (after all, the problems of a child were way more important than any plans a parent could have made), Daiki let out a whine that made both of his parents wince to hear. “No, I wanna go to her party! I got invited, I’m going to it! Just lemme stay with her while you’re gone!”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Standing up from the chair she’d been sitting in, Kaede scooped up Daiki and held him under her arm, feeling him squirm while he continued protesting the denial of his request. She slowly carried him over to her piano bench, setting him down before taking a seat for herself and offering him the one next to her. His eyes, brimming with warm tears, looked at her like she was crazy, but sat down after she told him he needed to. “Here, let’s play something together so you can calm down, I promise it’s all going to work out. Isn’t that right, Shuichi?”

“I already said my plan, I’m sure her father will be willing to work with us on this, especially when I tell him why you’ll be unable to go. It’s going to be fine, Daiki, you just have to believe in what we’re capable of.” As Shuichi finished speaking, the sounds of Kaede beginning playing warmup notes on the piano filled their home, and within minutes the boy had forgotten about how upset he’d been over not getting to go to the party he’d been invited to.

What he was doing that weekend instead was not anything that he’d heard of any of the other kids getting to do (another testament to how unordinary his life was), but it was painted as something rather normal for his family because it wasn’t the first time they’d had to do it. It was several hours of sitting at the airport without any intentions of them going anywhere, waiting for some of those family friends he’d grown up with to arrive; but when they did finally come away from their gate, it wasn’t just the members of the family that Daiki and his parents had known there with them. “Who’s that baby?” he asked, pointing to a small child being held between the couple. “Mom, Dad, who’s that? I don’t know them, did they steal a baby?”

“They didn’t steal her, but…oh, we’ll have Maki explain it, she’s best at it.” Smiling over her son’s head as she waved towards her friends, Kaede managed to catch the attention of one of the older children with them and got the whole group to come to where they’d been waiting for so long. “So, how did it go? I see you guys managed to get her out of there.”

“Remind me never to do work with a foreign orphanage again,” Maki replied, letting go of the child’s hand to brush her bangs back out of her face, her other hand holding a bag of someone’s belongings. “That was easily worse than all the rest of them combined, even with the pre-approvals and everything. Apparently they didn’t realize we had more than just her we’d be caring for.”

“And yet you didn’t try calling me to get someone to help you on the legal side of things, I’m hurt,” Shuichi said with a laugh, before noticing that Daiki was still incredibly confused about who this unknown child was. “Oh I think someone here isn’t quite sure what you were up to this past week, do you think you could tell him?”

Maki knew immediately who was being referred to, and she crouched down to be more at eye-level with Daiki, who felt a sense of security being able to stare directly into Maki’s face. “We were getting Zasha and bringing her somewhere that she will be loved,” she explained, motioning with her head towards the little girl who was staring at the world around her with eyes that looked like they’d been recently bruised. “You understand that, don’t you?”

“I do!” Daiki replied, clapping his hands together. “You got her just like you got all your other kids, because you’re the best place for them to be loved!” He was fully aware that each of the children surrounding Maki and her husband had come from places that they said weren’t _good_ for them, so they’d brought them into their home, because he’d heard about it from all of them before. It had raised the question of where he’d come from and why his parents hadn’t told him why they had him in their house, but he’d been told when he’d asked that he’d learn that when he was older. Not that it made any sense that he had to wait, because he was a bit older than Lian, who was one of the children who lived in Maki’s house, and she knew where she came from, so it never quite seemed fair that he had to wait to learn his backstory.

Still, though, he was happy that there was another kid he’d get to spend time with whenever he was at that house, and he couldn’t complain that he had to miss a friend’s birthday party to get to be there when Zasha came home for the first time—especially not when Lian said she’d been invited too and was sad she’d missed it. Despite the two of them having very different backgrounds and family lives, they were the best of friends and spent as much time together as they could, to the point that they were almost like brother and sister themselves, and that did include going to the make-up party that Shuichi had arranged with the father of the birthday child in the first place. How could a child who was given so much in life, from parents who loved him to a best friend who was always there, ever find himself unhappy with anything?

He was naïve to think that things would always be great, and as it turned out, getting the answer to one of his life’s greatest questions would bring in a new age for him: the age of feeling like he was losing everything around him. It came as they were out for dinner for his mother’s birthday, just the three of them, which was unusual enough because most meals had at least someone else stopping by for the occasion. “Daiki, I’ve heard a lot about how you’re getting along super well with Zasha when you’re spending time with Kaito and Maki,” Kaede started to say halfway through the meal, which she’d been picking at while her husband had barely touched his and her son had already finished. “How do you like spending time with someone so much younger than you?”

“She’s nice, I don’t know what she says to me but she likes to play and that’s what matters,” he replied, not even noticing that he was the only one who’d eaten so far. “Lian likes her too, but she doesn’t understand her either. How does a sister not know what her sister is saying? If _I_ had a sister, I’d understand her!”

Covering his mouth with his napkin as he tried not to cough too loudly in surprise at what he’d just heard, Shuichi gave Kaede a side-eyed look as he collected himself. “Well, you can’t understand her because you don’t speak the same language as her. She grew up in a different country, she learned to talk differently than you did. You don’t remember it, but when they first brought Lian home she spoke a different language as well, but she learned quickly.”

“Oh, okay, I guess I get it.” Daiki didn’t actually get it, but he did know that whenever Zasha tried to say something to one of them, Lian would go get her father if she could to have him explain what was being said, and that made him ask, “So does uncle Kaito know how to talk to Zasha? Or does he make it up?”

“He does know, actually, it’s part of why they brought her home.” The side-eyeing continued, even after Shuichi dropped his napkin and pushed his plate away from him, leaning forward into the table. “I can tell you that if you have a sister, you won’t have the same problem that you have with Zasha.”

“Or if you have a brother,” Kaede quickly added, a big smile forming on her lips as she looked like she was about to jump out of her seat. “Either way, there won’t be a language barrier once they learn to talk, because they’ll be learning from the best big brother they could ever ask for!”

“But Zasha has a big brother and two big sisters to learn from, and she’s even got me, so why can’t she learn to talk how we can understand her?” There seemed to be something about the conversation that Daiki was missing, but he didn’t know what it was or how he was supposed to ask about it. “Why would it be different if I was the big brother?”

“If you were a big brother, you wouldn’t be having to teach someone who learned a different language, that’s why.” Noticing the almost frenzied look he was currently being given by his wife, Shuichi narrowed his eyebrows and tried to make sense of why she looked like she did. The way that she very gently moved her head forward, as if he had missed an obvious point she was trying to make with him, seemed to do the trick as he shook his head and gathered his thoughts. “It still won’t be easy, but it’ll be much easier than what they have to do with her right now.”

Daiki was also looking at his mother, seeing as her eyes turned to land on him even with how overly excited she was about something. “Mom, what’s going on right now, why do you look like you’re gonna scream?”

“Would you like to be a big brother, do you think?” she asked, ignoring the question her son had posed at her. “Getting to watch someone smaller than you grow up, getting to help them with everything as they learn…do you think you’d like that?”

“Lian likes being a big sister, so I could like being a big brother,” he replied, shrugging because he didn’t particularly feel strongly about the idea. “Are we gonna go to the airport to go get me a brother or sister?”

At that, Kaede’s excitement seemed to burst and she broke out into tears, grabbing her cheeks as they quickly became wet with her crying. “No, we’re not going to go get a brother or sister at the airport,” she sobbed, Shuichi doing what he could to comfort her by wrapping an arm around her and resting her head into his shoulder. “Daiki, sweetie, we’re going to be giving you one anyway.”

“But…how?” His question was innocent, because at nine years old Daiki had never actually had the conversation about how babies were made, and his only experience in his personal life with a child coming into a family had been months before when Zasha had been adopted by her parents. “If not the airport, are you gonna go to the store and get one?”

“That’s not quite how it works,” Shuichi said, bracing himself for what he knew was about to happen. “You see, some families get their children by getting them from other places, like Lian and Zasha, but that isn’t the only way to get them. It’s not how we got you, after all.” There was a pause as he looked at Daiki’s face, which was going through multiple levels of trying to process what he was hearing, and he felt a tinge of guilt as he knew he was about to only make it worse. “Okay, let’s start from the very beginning…”

Over the course of the next several minutes, the poor boy’s entire world was thrown on the side as he learned an abridged version of the way life was created, as well as the fact that gone ahead and _made_ another child without telling him they were going to. And from that very moment on, with his parents’ excited and very nervous faces beaming at him, Daiki swore that he was not going to be happy even slightly about getting a brother or sister, because it was going to be a total change from his normal life and he was not a fan of that sort of thing.

His “ordinary” life was not going to be ordinary any longer, and he couldn’t be angrier about the whole ordeal.

* * *

Gone were the days where family bonding consisted of crowds and piano playing, and in were the nights spent with books about how to adjust to being an older sibling, read in tones that tried to make the books aimed at younger kids sound interesting to someone Daiki’s age. He absolutely hated it, regardless of if it was his mother or father reading the books to him and trying to make him become more enthused about things. “I want to go over to play with Lian,” he groaned, rolling over on the floor and off of the pillow that had been set up for him to lay on. “That would be more fun than _this_.”

“I know you want to go play with your best friend, but you have to be ready for your brother or sister when they get here,” Shuichi said, before setting the book aside and motioning for the boy to come sit in the chair with him, something he did after a moment’s hesitation. There was plenty of room for him to sit there on his father’s lap, but he chose to sit as far to the side as he could, knocking the book onto the floor and out of their reach before settling down. “Remember when we were at dinner for your mother’s birthday and you talked about how well you got along with Zasha? Why aren’t you willing to get along that well with the new baby?”

“The baby isn’t gonna be as cool as Zasha is, I know it.” Giving a loud _hmph_ as he attempted to squirm his way further against the arm of the chair, Daiki felt his father grabbing his shoulders, before one of those hands found itself on the top of his head, ruffling his dark, messy hair that never seemed to all be able to lay flat. “Sto-o-op it, Dad, I’m not having fun right now.”

Shuichi ceased with the ruffling, although he let his hand sink down into the hair it was holding. “I know you’re not, but it’ll get better, and I promise that you’ll find that Zasha’s nowhere near as cool as the baby will be, even if she’s older and knows how to play with you. We’ll get there someday.”

“I don’t want to get there any day! I don’t want there to be a baby around here, I like it just being me and you and Mom! Why’d you have to do this to me?” He was almost crying as his voice got louder and louder with every word, until he was sniffling at the end. “Send the baby back where it came from, I don’t want it here!”

“That’s…not really a choice we have, sorry about that.” His tone may have been apologetic, but there was no way that Shuichi actually meant his apology, and Daiki was beyond smart enough to pick up on the deceit. He knew that his father wasn’t sorry even slightly about what they were going to be introducing into the family, and he knew that no matter how much he argued about how he didn’t want there to be a baby around, he wasn’t going to get anywhere. His parents were fully expecting to _replace_ him and ruin his life that he’d gotten so comfortable in, and he wasn’t going to take that laying down.

Or, rather, sitting down, which he proved by getting out of his father’s lap much faster than he’d gotten into it. “I’m gonna go ask Mom to see what she says, because I don’t want this,” he said, dramatically bouncing away from where his father watched him in disbelief, shaking his head at how poorly things had gone.

In the weeks since his parents had first told him about the baby, Daiki had noticed that his mother was spending a lot more time in their bedroom than anywhere else, including at her piano. Whenever she wanted to get some time in with him, he’d have to go into the room and sit on the bed with her, and she acted like nothing was wrong but there was something off about how she looked, which he couldn’t quite place. That changed that night when he pushed his way into his parents’ room unannounced and saw his mother laying in the bed, blankets askew and everywhere but on her, with her head thrown over the side. He gasped at seeing her, which made her lift her head to see who was there, and the shock that covered her face at realizing it was Daiki and not her husband had her falling back over.

“D-don’t come any closer, please,” she begged, and for every bit of him that wanted to listen to her because he was a good kid who followed the rules, there was an equal part that felt the need to see what was going on. Sure enough, he found out why she’d asked him to stay away when he got over to her side of the bed and saw that there was a trash can underneath where her head had been hanging, and just the sight of it made him feel squeamish. “I told you not to get closer, why didn’t you listen?”

“Because I wanted to see…” Daiki started to say, before finding himself being picked up and placed on the bed without any choice in what was happening. The culprit for moving him was his father, who still looked to be somewhat disbelieving but was more worried about other things in that moment.

“Something tells me this isn’t normal, Kaede. It’s been days since I last saw you actually able to eat anything, shouldn’t you take that more seriously?” Kneeling down beside the bed to get a better look at his wife’s pale face, Shuichi could see her answer waiting on her lips, but it was given away by the weak nod she gave him. “Then it’s settled, we should take care of this now. No point in waiting when it isn’t looking like it’ll get better.”

She nodded again, rolling over to her back, where she grabbed her face and ran her hands over it several times. “What do we do with Daiki? I don’t think we should take him with us, not when he has school in the morning…”

“I’m sure Kaito and Maki won’t mind watching him for us while we take care of this, they’ve—wait.” Standing back up, Shuichi looked straight at Daiki, whose eyes had lit up at the mention of the place he’d wanted to go all along. “This isn’t a good thing that you’re getting to go over there, don’t act like you earned it after how you acted.”

“Wait, how did he act?” Kaede asked, trying to sit up as she spoke but ending up hunched over the side of the bed once more, drowning out any immediate answer to her question with the sound of her retching, a noise that made the other two in the room both understand the severity of what was going on.

Not even half an hour later, and without much explanation given to the boy, Daiki was dropped off at the front door of a home a few streets away, with a teenage girl standing in the doorway to accept his presence. “Mom said to keep an ear out for you, so I was listening super close,” she said as she was closing the door behind herself and Daiki upon entry. “Didn’t want you waiting outside for even a second.”

He gave her a smile, looking up at her and her long blonde hair she kept pulled back just high enough that he couldn’t reach it to pull on it (a fun game they’d played when they were younger). “Thanks for that, Estelle,” he replied, seeing her start skipping towards her bedroom once the door was locked. “Hey wait, where do I go?”

“Lian’s in her room, if you want to play with her, other than that Mom and Zasha are asleep, Dad’s in his office, and I don’t know where Ollie is, but if you find him tell him I’m ready to beat him in some games if he’s ready.” Estelle gave Daiki the tiniest wave before heading off, clomping her way up the stairs like she was ungraceful with every step she took up them, and he considered following her until he remembered she’d literally just said that Lian was in her room, and her room was on the main floor of the house.

He was intimately familiar with the layout of the house he was currently in, much more than he was with any place other than his own home, entirely due to how often he’d spent time there when his parents were too busy to watch him. He knew that his uncle Kaito did something with space stuff, but the specifics weren’t ever discussed, and his aunt Maki worked with children who didn’t have homes, and that was how the four kids living there had come into their lives. Stopping mid-step as he began to seethe over remembering that his parents couldn’t choose to do things that way and instead had to get a baby involved, Daiki’s pace picked up and he found himself running right into the open door to Lian’s room, where she was sitting on the floor playing with some dolls.

“Oh, hello Daiki,” she greeted, offering him the doll from her left hand, while she had a death grip on the one in her right. “I was just starting to play family with my dolls, but if you’re here you can help me. They’re talking about getting a kitty, because that’s the kind of baby these mommies want.”

“Why is it always about babies now?” he asked as he took the doll, sitting down across from Lian so they could play together. “At least kitties are better than actual babies, I’d leave if you were gonna make me play something about that with you.”

She laughed, throwing her head side to side for a moment before collecting herself. “No, real babies are icky and gross, my dolls only like kitties and maybe puppies as their kids. Mom says that not everyone has to like babies and that’s okay, so…yeah!”

“I wish my parents could think like that,” Daiki grumbled, remembering why he was there in the first place. If his parents hadn’t decided they wanted to have a new baby, there wouldn’t have been any problems and they wouldn’t be at the doctor like they were. But thinking about the fact that his mother was so sick that she had to go to the doctor made him feel guilty about being upset to begin with, and he had to push the thoughts from his mind to try and enjoy playing with Lian while he could.

He wasn’t actually sure how long they were engrossed in the game with the dolls (and the several small stuffed cats that she brought in for them to own), but it came to a halt when someone much taller than either of them appeared in the doorway. “You’ve got school tomorrow, it’s about time to start getting ready for bed,” Kaito said, looking down at Lian with a smile, which she nodded at and immediately began cleaning up her room, while he turned his attention to Daiki, who seemed confused about what was happening. “As for you, come with me, we’ve got somewhere special for you tonight.”

“You mean I have to stay here?” he asked, suddenly feeling very small as he was being smiled at. “Where are my parents?”

“They’re not anywhere bad, they’re just not gonna make it back here before too late, so don’t worry and come with me.” It wasn’t really an answer, and Daiki hated that he was given something that didn’t tell him anything, but Lian turned to him and wordlessly told him to listen to her father, and he couldn’t argue against his best friend’s demand. As he stood up, he could see Kaito stepping out of the way of leaving the room, and once he was out in the hallway he felt himself getting picked up and carried down the hall. “Figured it’d be faster if I carried you, that’s not a problem, is it?”

“I guess not,” he replied, which Kaito took as acceptance of the situation and so he was carried from outside Lian’s room all the way up the stairs, to the small guest room that he’d slept in many times before, usually when he’d get tired after school or when his parents were over being social until late in the night. He was set down on the end of the bed, only for Kaito to sit down next to him. “So do I sleep here?”

“That’s the plan, your dad called me a few minutes ago and asked if you could stay overnight.” While he was speaking, Kaito was looking at the boy, seeing how he was fidgeting there in his spot. “What’s bothering you, kid? Usually you’re as happy as your mom always acts, but you haven’t been the same the last few times I’ve seen you. You picking up more of your dad’s traits or what?”

Usually Daiki would be open about how he felt, especially with one of his favorite adults, but he couldn’t bring himself to say much at all. “I just want to go home,” he finally admitted, “but I guess I can’t even do that.”

“Yeah, not tonight, not if you wanna try going to school in the morning. If you went home tonight, you’d be too tired to go to school, and what good comes of that? We all know how much you hate missing school, Lian talks about it all the time.” Taking a finger and poking the very tip of Daiki’s nose with it, Kaito chuckled and laid backwards on the bed, kicking his legs out and waiting for the boy to do the same. When he didn’t, he sat back up and chose to push him over himself, just to get things done. “Promise me you’re not going to spend all night worrying about things, it’s not that big of a deal.”

“Mom’s sick, it’s kind of a big deal.”

“Just trust me about it not being one, okay? Your dad wanted to tell you himself, because he’s a smart guy and knows that you’re just like he is with overthinking, but he needed to not be on his phone too long.” Kaito watched as Daiki was trying to sit back up, and he playfully pushed him back over every time he got halfway there, eventually getting the boy to laugh and agree to not think things over too much. Once that was out of the way, he got off the edge of the bed and watched as Daiki moved up to the other side, showing that he was ready to go to sleep. “We’ll get you to school in the morning, and if all goes well they’ll pick you up, so look forward to that. Good night, kid, sleep tight and dream of the stars.”

“Thanks, uncle Kaito,” Daiki mumbled, trying to process how he’d gotten so exhausted so quickly. Even with that exhaustion settling in, and the familiarity of sleeping in that guest room many times before, he lay there for a long while working through everything that could have been wrong before he drifted off, waking up in the same place he’d fallen asleep but forgetting why he was there and not in his own bedroom.

True to what he’d been told, he was picked up after a very disorienting day by his parents, who both looked like they’d seen better days but were super happy to have their child back with them. The car ride home was a lot of Daiki talking about his day and how he’d gotten away with not having his homework or any of his books because Kaito had told his teacher what was going on, but he had to make it up the next day or else he was going to be in trouble. “That’s really good that she believed him, I was worried she’d discredit it because it wasn’t one of us saying it,” Shuichi said, having thought about that possibility most likely long before anyone else had. “Hopefully this won’t happen again, though, we’ll just have to believe that things will be okay from here on out.”

“I told you, I felt so much better the moment they gave me those fluids, I don’t think it’ll happen again,” Kaede replied, rubbing at a spot on her arm that was underneath some sort of bandage, which Daiki tried not to pay attention to. “And if it does, we know where we can go and who to ask for. They really helped me out there.”

“Were you at the doctor all night?” It was natural for Daiki, having been given so few details about what had happened, to be so curious, and his parents were well accustomed to his questions, so for the rest of the ride home they focused on answering that for him. Yes, they had been at the hospital overnight because they had wanted to make sure things weren’t immediately going to get worse again. Yes, they’d missed him every moment they were gone. And yes, they would let him know exactly what was going on next time, if there was a next time.

He accepted all of the answers graciously, even if he wasn’t fond of how the _baby_ was mentioned a few times in all of it. That meant that when they got to the house and he was able to get inside to his homework he needed to complete, he was focused on the task at hand and not on thinking too much about where his parents had been. But that couldn’t last forever, and as he was finishing up his writing assignment (it was just putting sentences in order to tell a story, but it was still homework and he liked doing it), his mother was coming to sit next to him at the table, some sort of paper in her hands. “I figured you might like to see this, since maybe seeing it will make things make more sense,” Kaede told him, as she unfolded the paper and laid it flat on the table between them. “When we were with the doctor, they wanted to check on the baby to make sure they were still doing fine, even though I was as sick as I was.”

“That’s not a baby,” Daiki bluntly replied, looking at the grayscale pictures and not seeing anything even remotely resembling what he knew a baby to look like. “That’s a bad drawing that someone didn’t use colors on.”

“Oh, no, it really is the baby! Here, let me show you!” Taking her son’s hand into her own and gently moving it onto the pictures, Kaede used one of his fingers to point at a somewhat defined part of one of the images. “That’s their head, pretty soon we’ll be able to see its nose and it’ll really start to look like it has a face!” Together their hands moved down to a different picture, where she traced along some of what was depicted. “This is its body, and its little arms and legs starting to grow! Aren’t you excited to be able to get hugs from those arms someday?”

He tried to pull his hand out from his mother’s but she didn’t want to let it go, so he squirmed as far away from her as he could without falling out of his seat instead. “No, Mom, I don’t want hugs from a baby I didn’t ask you for. Why can’t you just get rid of it?”

“Daiki, you take that back right now, we’re not getting rid of the baby and that’s final! Stop acting like this is the worst thing that could happen to you, when it’s one of the best!” Huffing, Kaede quickly added, “You don’t know how long and hard we’ve tried to give you a brother or a sister, and you’re being so ungrateful right now!”

Something about those words hit Daiki hard, especially when his mother started crying after delivering her statement. He looked at her with his mouth slightly agape, seeing her face reddened in anger and her eyes streaming with tears. Before he could say anything in apology, she let go of his hand and got up from the chair she’d sat in, walking away after knocking the pictures to the floor, and he could hear her crying until she was out of sight; knowing that he’d caused himself nothing but trouble in being so indignant about not wanting a sibling he nearly threw himself out of the chair and ran through the house to find where she’d gone.

His parents’ bedroom door was shut when he saw it, and he could hear his mother’s crying loudly from the other side, so he did what any child who wanted to know what was going on would do and dropped down to the floor outside the door and got as close to the crack at the bottom as he could. “I know it’s getting to you, but you can’t let it ruin this moment. If he wants to misbehave and act like a brat, that’s not your fault.” Just hearing his father say such things made Daiki feel so much smaller than he was, laying on the floor, but he knew he was in too deep to just leave it at that, he had to hear what their plan was for dealing with him. “I know, I know, just let it out…I’ll handle him somehow.”

“He wants us to get rid of them, Shuichi, I don’t know how you’re going to teach him that’s not something you ever say but he needs to learn it, and now!” She sounded incredibly pitiful speaking through her tears, like she was wounded deeply, and Daiki knew that her being upset was wholly his fault. “I’m not going to give up my baby, but I don’t want to keep making my little boy so mad about everything!”

“He’ll understand soon enough that this isn’t being done to hurt him, but before then he needs to get that what he says matters, especially to you.” The sound of footsteps began to creep closer to the door, and Daiki tried to pick himself up before the door opened—but he wasn’t quite fast enough, as Shuichi very nearly stepped on him trying to leave the room. “And just what do you think you’re doing here? Picked up that trick from the Momota kids, didn’t you?”

Although he knew that it had been Lian who’d initially taught him about laying outside a room to listen in on a conversation inside (“This way we can hear what Ollie and Estelle are saying without being in there,” she’d tell him, which he appreciated), Daiki was not going to drag his best friend into things. “N-no, I just thought maybe I could do it, since I know I hurt Mom and I…yeah, I wanted to make sure she wasn’t too sad.”

“What you’ve said and how you’ve acted has really hurt her, yes,” Shuichi replied, waiting for Daiki to get to his feet before bringing him inside the room. “Now you need to apologize to her and make sure it won’t happen again. That’s…really all I can think of to have you do right now.”

The conflict in Daiki’s heart as he looked at his crying mother, her hands fiddling with her long hair and looking anywhere but at him, made it hard for him to comply with what he’d been told to do. He knew that he should really apologize, but he still wasn’t sold on the baby thing and he didn’t want to give the impression that he’d suddenly changed his mind on matters. “Mom, I didn’t mean to make you cry, I’m sorry for doing that,” he finally said, coming closer to her even though she was still not looking at him. “Will you forgive me?”

“Only if you’ll stop being so negative and broody about having a sibling,” she choked out in reply, her hands falling from her hair to in front of her stomach, which Daiki had noticed she’d been protecting more often. “I know you’re mad you didn’t know we were planning this but a child isn’t always going to be involved in his parents’ decisions.”

“I can try to be better?”

A pause, where Kaede looked at Shuichi and saw him motioning for her to accept the apology, him really not knowing how else to handle the situation. “I suppose trying’s better than nothing at all,” she conceded. “We’ll see how things go then, I guess!”

* * *

Calling how Daiki acted in the following weeks being better about things would have been a stretch, because he was still firmly against the idea of there being a baby in the house in a matter of months (a detail he found out a few days after the crying incident), but he was giving it his best shot. It was just difficult for him to start mentally switching from being an only child, the pride and joy of his parents, to knowing that there was about to be another person that they loved just as much, if not more. Lian’s suggestion for him was to just be happy about things, which was easy for her because she never had a bad day in her life, but he struggled to see the bright side of most situations, this one most especially.

That quirk he’d noticed when apologizing to his mother began to come up more and more as time went on, something that he knew from those dumb books his parents had tried reading to him. Babies grew in their mother’s stomach, and that wasn’t just something that happened every so often, but rather every time someone was having a baby, and Daiki was getting to see it happen before his very eyes with his dear mother. It seemed like every day she was a little bit bigger, which he really only noticed whenever she’d pull him into a hug and he could feel it just a smidge more as he was pressed into it.

“I don’t think Mom can grow a whole baby in her,” he confidently said to his father one day, not paying attention to see the way that Shuichi had to stop himself from laughing at the statement. “Babies get to be too big, and I don’t think Mom can get that big.”

“You say that now, but babies don’t get to be _that_ big, and besides, she grew you inside of her, so I think she’ll be just fine.” Watching his son do a double-take at that revelation, Shuichi decided that he’d find some pictures that would illustrate things much better than mere words would, and much more personally than using a book from the store would. “I’ll tell you what, I’m going to talk to her about this and we’ll show you something to explain this to you. Sound like a plan?”

Unsure of what it could mean, Daiki accepted the plan and set a chain of events in motion that ended up with him looking through a collection of pictures of himself when he was a baby. The plan had ended up taking advantage of all of the almost-obsessive picture-taking that had been done when he was younger, something that Kaede had always insisted she do just in case she ever began longing for a time that had long since passed as her little boy grew up. “There’s no way this is me,” he repeated every time he’d see a picture of a tiny version of him, with light hair and even lighter eyes, being held in the arms of either of his parents, or on the floor, or in a crib that he recognized as being one that had been recently built in the spare room of the house. “These have to be pictures of some other baby, I don’t look like this now and I didn’t look like that then.”

“Oh here, this one might make you accept things a bit more,” Kaede said, picking out a different picture of two bigger children and showing it to Daiki, who went stone-faced at seeing it. It still had the light-haired version of him that he didn’t believe could really be him, but the child next to him was definitely Lian, holding on to a blanket that covered her from neck to toes. “That’s the first time the two of you ever got to play together. That’s…also the only time that day she wasn’t crying at how many people were around, but that’s not what’s important here. Isn’t that you, Daiki?”

“It is,” he agreed, looking up from the picture to his mother and her soft smile, as she was finally able to prove that the child was him after all. “So all of these are me too? What happened to me, I looked…small. And super different.”

“Yeah, when you were born up until you were four or so, you looked like a tiny version of me, and then suddenly your hair turned dark and it’s been that way since.” Getting a different set of pictures to show her son, Kaede gave a wistful sigh before handing them off to him so he could start looking, while she glanced in Shuichi’s direction, seeing him also browsing through some of the pictures. “I can’t believe how much he’s grown up, he used to be our little baby and now he’s going to be a big brother and that’s super exciting!”

Shuichi nodded in agreement, but seemed like his mind was on something that wasn’t what she was saying. “This is great and all, and you’ve helped him understand that he was a baby once, but when I brought this up to you I had a specific kind of pictures in mind…”

“He’s looking at those ones right now,” she replied, beaming at her husband as he lowered the pictures he was looking at to see what Daiki had in his hands. “I picked out only the ones that weren’t super unflattering, because you guys were so mean to me with getting the worst poses a lot of the time.”

“That’s what happens when you ask people to take candid pictures of you.” Watching over Daiki’s shoulder as he went from picture to picture, Shuichi kept stealing looks back up at Kaede, who was going through the rest of the pictures again. “I’m already noticing you’re not as insistent we take pictures every day this time, what happened there?”

“Oh, I just didn’t want to have to—”

Daiki cut his mother off to loudly announce, “I _get_ it now, when a baby is growing it makes their mom get super-duper big and now I know that Mom grew me in her just like she’s growing this baby. Can I be done now?”

“—we can finish talking later,” she hurriedly stated, before taking the pictures out of Daiki’s hands and handing them off solely to Shuichi. “Sorry that you had to see those, but you have to understand how this whole thing’s going to work, so please at least try to be nice about it.”

“I will try,” Daiki replied, giving his mom a hesitant glance to make sure she wasn’t trying to make him look at any other pictures. “I’m gonna go play games now, thanks for showing me these things!” In reality he wished he hadn’t had to sit there looking at any of them in the first place, but he knew that his parents had set the whole thing up for him to get a better understanding of what was going on and that it was all going to work out.

That didn’t quite save him from having to grapple with the reality as it came, though, and even though he was being less sour about the whole baby thing he was still not happy with it. As the weeks went by he tried distracting himself with schoolwork and his time spent with friends (he was going over to play with Lian a lot once again, even though his mother wasn’t really working anymore and his father was only working hours he was at school for the most part), but it was hard to forget that something so horrible was happening in the world around him whenever he’d see his parents talking and interacting. There was so much kissing, so much hugging, so many hands placed on stomachs that were getting bigger and rounder by the day, and he didn’t feel very good having to see any of it.

He wasn’t even able to make himself fully enjoy seeing more pictures of the baby, which wasn’t as little as it had been the previous time, but still wasn’t nearly big enough to actually be real in his mind. Being able to see the face and know that it was waving in one of the pictures, a fact told to him by his mother as she pointed at the tiny little alien hand making the motions, it made Daiki wish that something would happen and the baby would be taken back by its actual, otherworldly parents, because there was no way it was actually a person that he was looking at.

But it _was_ a person, and it _was_ going to be his little brother or sister someday, and whichever one it was going to be his parents were staying tight-lipped about. They knew, they said they knew, they told everyone that they saw that they knew, but they wouldn’t tell him what it was going to be and they weren’t telling any of their adult friends either. That didn’t stop everyone from buying all sorts of baby things for them to stock up on and use, though, or bringing them over from their own homes because they didn’t need them anymore. Daiki saw several things brought by Kaito and Maki that had been around their home as long as he could remember, like toys and clothes that had been used more recently for playing dolls than for actual babies. “Sorry if any of the stuff’s torn or stained, Lian and Zasha had a lot of it hidden in their toyboxes,” Maki sharply explained as she dropped a box down in front of the room that was going to belong to the baby. “No idea where they got it from, but I’d be willing to guess it’s because someone went rooting through the storage bins in the attic.”

“It’s totally fine, we’ll make use of it somehow,” Kaede graciously replied, while Shuichi was bent down looking through the contents of the box. “Even if it’s not really usable, I’m sure just having extra things around that we won’t feel guilty messing up will come in handy. It’ll be a lot better than ruining everything brand new, I remember how awful that was when we were in those first months with Daiki.”

Hearing his name, Daiki poked his head into the conversation, distracting himself from the homework he’d been working on. “I wouldn’t ruin things,” he proclaimed, making both of his parents laugh at his bold statement. “Well? I wouldn’t.”

“I can give you a list of things you ruined, but I don’t think you’d appreciate that very much.” A pause, as Kaede craned her neck to be able to look over to where Daiki was sitting. “You don’t even remember it, but we used to have a nice chair that I’d sit in with you all day and night when you couldn’t stop crying, and then one time you got sick and that was the end of that chair.”

“Yeah, let’s try to stick to chairs that aren’t covered in fabric we can’t wash when we’re cradling sick children,” Shuichi told her, standing up holding a stuffed cat that Daiki recognized as being one that he had used to play with Lian rather recently. While he was watching his father, he saw him stroke the fur on the cat’s head before putting it on Kaede’s shoulder, her laughing and making it fall backwards off of her, hitting the ground and being promptly forgotten about.

In that moment, Daiki began to wonder if he was going to become just like that cat once the baby was in the house, left to be forgotten about on the floor because he wasn’t important enough. He sniffled and went back to his work, trying to ignore what his parents and their friends were talking about and doing a decent enough job of it, only listening when he heard his name get mentioned—this time out of Kaito’s mouth, as he was asking about some sort of arrangement that Daiki hadn’t heard the beginning of. It must not have been super important, because they moved on to talking about baby things again rather quickly, but that was the last time for a long while that he felt like he mattered to any of the adults in his life.

It was hard to talk to anyone anymore, because everyone was more curious about the baby than they were about him. “Mom says your mom is gonna have that baby around Ollie’s birthday,” Lian said one day when he was over at their house to play after school. “Maybe they’ll have the same birthday, then Ollie can have a birthday buddy! He needs one, since Dad has Estelle and me and Zasha have each other.” She stopped for a moment when she saw her friend shrink back at the idea, but continued on when she thought more about things. “And you, you’ve got your dad, right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he replied, knowing that his birthday was six days after his father’s, even though he was sure that he wasn’t going to get any attention that day because everyone would be more focused on the baby than they could be on him. “I don’t want Ollie and the baby to share a birthday, because then Ollie won’t get a birthday either.”

“He’s gonna be fourteen, he’s already old, he can share.” Picking up one of her dolls to start braiding its hair, Lian looked over at Daiki as he fell backwards, laying out his arms as he took up as much space on the floor as he could. She considered saying something about how silly he was acting, but she shrugged it off and went on with her braiding, making him upset because he wasn’t getting any more attention from her. The next time he was over there to play, he stuck with spending time teaching Zasha how to read all of her color words, leaving Lian and her insistence on things being the way she wanted them to herself.

Every week it seemed like something new was going on, either at home or wherever else he was stuck, and he truly hated every moment of it that he didn’t have control over. Quickly his favorite thing to do became spending those moments with a two-year-old that needed someone to show her how to say all of the words she didn’t know, but that was relayed to his parents as him preparing himself for being the best big brother he could be, which he felt was a bad representation of what he was doing. To him, he was just being helpful, and that was all he really aimed to do, because it made everyone proud of him, but to everyone it looked like he was being something more than that. But even with the misconception of what he was doing, he continued doing it every time he could, never letting the others take away the one thing left in his life that was making him happy.

He certainly wasn’t finding much happiness at home anymore, that was for sure, given that everything within those walls had turned to being exclusively about the baby. Daiki really did feel like he was beginning to turn invisible to his parents, who were more focused on each other or what they could do for when the baby came than they ever were focused on him. Even when it was just him home alone with his mother, she wouldn’t pay him any attention, either spending her time playing her piano or organizing things that they’d bought for the baby, and try as he might he couldn’t distract her from either.

True to his fear, his birthday didn’t amount to much, barely a party for him to invite friends to, although most of the kids who came weren’t really friends of his so much as they were friends of Lian’s, and she had complete control over all of them. He ended up spending the majority of his party sitting alone, watching as Lian and the other kids swarmed around Kaede and asked her question after question about the baby (or at least that’s what he assumed they were talking about, he deliberately kept his distance so he wouldn’t have to hear it). The only time he was the center of attention was when he was opening his gifts, and even then it was merely because there wasn’t anything else for the group to fixate on.

The last stretch before the baby was supposed to be born dragged on, and for once that wasn’t just something that Daiki was making up in his mind. “I wish it could be time for this little one to make their arrival,” Kaede said one late October day, a hand twirling the ends of her untamed hair while the other rest firmly on top of her large and very prominent stomach, which Daiki made it a point to avoid contact with. Even when he’d hear his mom talk about how the baby was kicking and squirming he chose to keep his distance, not wanting to get too close and find himself weirded out by the feeling. “Aren’t you starting to get excited to be a big brother yet?”

His quick negative answer seemed to cause her spirits to fall, but she replied by asking him to sit down so they could have a talk. “I know what you’re gonna say and I’m not changing my mind,” he replied, trying to stay firm in his resolve. If anything, his parents had to be proud of how they’d raised a confident child, and they had to at least be starting to rethink having a second one.

“I wasn’t going to ask you to change anything, don’t jump to conclusions. Sit down so I can sit next to you and we can talk.” Using even more firmness than her son just had, Kaede made a point that he felt wrong to fight against, and soon they were sitting side by side, her trying to get him to come closer to where she was. “Come on Daiki, I’m still your mother even if I have another child to be worrying about. You get over here right now, or I’ll call your father and have him deal with you.”

Knowing that in order to do that, his mother would have to interrupt his father at work, Daiki heaved a sigh before moving over, only for Kaede to grab him and lay his head down on her stomach, which he immediately tried to get out of. But breaking free from how she was holding him without accidentally hurting her seemed impossible, so he accepted his fate and felt rolling motions underneath the back of his head, which he knew were being caused by the baby. “It’s like an ocean in there,” he told her, not knowing how else to equate it. “Is that how it always feels?”

“Only sometimes. Other times it feels like they’re playing games, or doing flips, or sometimes even trying to break out, but they’re safe in there and they know they’re already loved so much.” She could see the way his face contorted at that statement and she frowned. “Please, Daiki, you need to be more accepting of the baby. They did nothing wrong.”

“I just…don’t want there to be a baby, Mom.” The motions continued underneath his head even as he was no longer paying attention to them, knowing that his refusal to be happy about everything was still hurting his mother. It was far past the point of him changing his mind on things, no matter how much she begged him to do so, and no matter how much his father pulled him aside and asked him to be more optimistic. He felt like his mind was permanently made up, and he was going to be upset forever and for always that he had a younger sibling that was ten years younger than him, unable to really connect or share interests or friends or anything of the sort.

But if anything, Kaede and Shuichi both were determined to make their son rethink his mindset, and they knew they had only a short amount of time to make it happen. That last stretch was spent with a lot more family time, reminding Daiki that he was very much loved and not being replaced in the slightest, but all he could see when they were all together was how affectionate his parents were being with each other and how every sentence they said to him was really said to whichever one of them wasn’t speaking. He just was not budging on his belief that the new baby was going to ruin his relationship with them, and there didn’t seem like anything was going to be able to be done after all.

Miracles could happen, though, and all it would take to make one happen was the miracle of life itself. The day was strange enough in Daiki’s mind, given that he was woken up that morning by his father asking him to be kind to Kaede that day, only for her to come into his room asking him to get ready so they could go on a walk around the neighborhood. It was not a request he’d ever had her ask him before, and when he tiredly pointed that out she replied with a smile, “It’s okay, I don’t think I’ll ask it much in the future. I just have a strong feeling that today might be the day.”

“What do you mean, the day? It’s Sunday, that’s always what today is.”

“Oh Daiki, just get ready and I’ll explain when we’re walking.” She very carefully wobbled out of the room, leaning on the doorframe for a moment before continuing on her way, and Daiki was genuinely worried if she was actually going to be able to survive an actual walk around anywhere if she was being so slow around the house. It turned out that the slowness he saw was her being intentional with every step, as once they were actually walking (after he’d had to help her get her shoes on, because she couldn’t reach to do it) she seemed to be perfectly fine.

Or as perfectly fine as someone that made it very clear she wanted to have the baby as soon as possible could be. It was a bit confusing for Daiki to hear his mother talk to him about that the way that she did, because she was saying it like there was anything he could do to help her, but he didn’t want to help. He didn’t even want to be around when the baby was born, but he was at least being a good sport about having to go out on the walk that never seemed to end. Every chance there was Kaede was choosing to sit down and asking for her son to join her, which he didn’t do once until they were turned back to head home and his legs ached from how far they’d gone. “Mom, do you think you can just carry me?” he asked her in all seriousness, getting her to laugh at the question. “I’m too tired to go further.”

“Same here, and if your dad was with us I’d ask him to carry _me_ , but we’ve just got to walk and prove that we’re stronger than we think.” Taking in a few deep breaths and letting her whole body relax there on the park bench, Kaede picked herself up after a moment and smiled at Daiki, who was red-faced from how much unexpected activity he’d been through. “Come on, we’ll be home soon enough, then you can relax and I’ll take a nice bath so I can maybe, hopefully, get this baby out.”

He nodded, still not sure why she was talking about that with him, but the walk home took much longer than the first half of the walk had, because their stops were twice as long and harder to resume walking from. That was something that both of them could be blamed for, though, and the laughter they shared between them for both hating long walks was a callback to days long past. Despite everything, for that time they were out on their walk everything seemed like it used to be, back before things changed and he was left thinking that he wasn’t wanted by either parent. If he could be sure of one thing, it was that his mother really did still love him, and love being with him, even if it was harder for her to show him that with everything else going on.

That acceptance, that he was still loved by the parent easily more affected by the whole baby thing, was something that Daiki had desperately needed to find in his life. It made going home and laying on the floor of his bedroom to relax (the bed would’ve been fine but then he would’ve wanted to go back to sleep) a time for him to reflect on how sour he’d been for months and months and how he really should have been acting better the whole time. How had he allowed himself to be so blinded by his own hatred? It wasn’t like he was the first person ever to have a younger sibling—after all, Lian had one under even stranger circumstances and she’d never been as nasty as he had! There had to be something he could do to atone for his crime, and after thinking about it for a while he got off the floor and searched the house for where his mother was, so he could properly apologize and mend the bridges he’d burned.

He’d envisioned a grand apology, with crying and hugging and a sense that everything was okay, but that wasn’t what he got. When he found where Kaede was hiding out, in the bath like she’d said she would be, he went to start by saying sorry but she cut him off before he had a chance to say a word. “I need you to do something for me,” she pleaded, her voice sounding labored with every syllable. “Please call your dad and tell him he needs to get home. He’ll know what it’s about, you won’t need to tell him.”

Daiki, having entered the room with the intention of being kind, was more than eager to fulfill the request, and he grabbed his mother’s phone off of the countertop to make the call on her behalf. He didn’t leave outside the bathroom, though, and so while he was waiting for Shuichi to pick up he could hear the moans and groans coming from inside the bathtub. They didn’t sound like anything his mother would normally be doing, which only built a bit of panic up inside his mind, leading him to begin spewing words the moments his father answered the call. “Mom’s making weird noises and we went on a walk earlier and she got in the tub and she told me to call you to tell you to come home and I think she might be dying.”

“Might be dying? I don’t think…” Shuichi trailed off and Daiki wondered if he was just doubting what he was saying, or if he was realizing he could be right since he wasn’t there to see it for himself. “Okay, kiddo, here’s what you need to do. Go put your mom’s phone back where you got it from and go find something to play or read or just occupy your time with, and I’ll be home as soon as I can to help her. Can you do that for me?”

As much as he didn’t want to, Daiki knew that he was being told to do these specific things for a reason, and questioning it would only waste time. “I can do that,” he replied with a firm nod, taking the phone from his ear and hanging up before anything else could be said. With his specific task in mind he took the phone back into the bathroom, trying his best to ignore his mother’s pained whines from where she was still sitting, and he went to his bedroom to pass the time. His activity of choice became to read through some of those silly books his parents had bought for him about becoming a big brother, with the fresh mindset that he wasn’t going to be replaced by the baby after all, and that was an easy way to pass the time.

His method of distracting himself only lasted as long as it took for someone to call his name, loudly and as if they were panicked, and he rushed out of his room with a book still in hand to see his father standing in the hallway, covered in water and offering out his own phone to Daiki. “Keep this on you, Kaito should be calling back any moment and since he’s calling for you, I think it’d be best if you answer it,” Shuichi explained, over the sound of loud screaming in the air from the bathroom. “I might miss it if I try to.”

Unsure of how he was supposed to react to that, just like most things that had happened that day, Daiki took the phone and promised his father he’d answer when the call came. But just because he knew that he was the one answering the call didn’t mean that Kaito knew as well, and when he called he acted like he was talking to his closest friend until Daiki was able to get a word in that it was him, not Shuichi, who was listening. “Oh, yeah, guess that makes sense. We’re on our way over, if you’re supposed to be telling your dad that, no idea what all he told you this call was about.”

“I don’t know anything about anything,” he honestly replied, knowing that telling the truth would make it easier to get more information if it was being given out (a skill that Lian had taught him, in reference to speaking with her father so it was completely valid). “All I know is that Mom is dying or something and she keeps screaming and—”

“They failed to mention she was _really_ going through it at the house,” Maki grumbled in the background, and Daiki assumed they were both listening to the conversation. “We need to get over there faster, before it’s too late and there’s nothing we can do to help.”

“—she really is dying!” Instead of doing the polite thing and hanging up before dashing off, Daiki dropped the phone on his bedroom floor and ran out of the room to go check on his mother, leaving both Maki and Kaito yelling at him to come back until they both figured he was long gone. It was a choice he could do nothing but regret the moment he burst back into that bathroom to the sounds of screaming and surprised shouting for him to get out, because in the few seconds he was aware of what was going on around him, he saw things he wished he’d never seen before in his life. Rather than ask what was going on (which had been his intention, he wanted to know why things were happening), he turned around and went right back to where he’d been told to go, fully intending on staying in his bedroom from then on until asked to go elsewhere.

When there was a knock at the door he waited until the second round of banging happened before he went to answer it; while Maki was running as fast as she could to get further inside Kaito was there to scoop Daiki up and tell him all about how they were going to have a great time together. As cautious as he was to believe that, he allowed himself to give it a shot, and so in his desire to believe Kaito after all he paid no attention to the screaming as it got louder and louder before disappearing completely, the only sign that something had happened in the house around them being when Maki came into the room just long enough to grab Shuichi’s phone and take it with her.

Before Daiki even realized it, it was far enough in the day that he was starving, and he brought that up to Kaito in time with his growling stomach. “Huh, I wasn’t told I’d have to feed you, but…” He pulled out his phone to check something, then tucked it back into his jacket pocket and smiled down at the boy. “I think I can make it work. Get ready and let’s go get something, I know just the place I wanna take you.”

“Or we could just have sandwiches here,” Daiki replied, not sure why Kaito had jumped to taking him somewhere. “I know how to make them, I’m ten years old after all.”

“Yeah, well, I want to treat a big brother to a big meal, that’s all.” It took a moment for those words to sink into Daiki’s mind, and he found himself staring with his jaw hanging in Kaito’s direction. “Just trust me on taking you somewhere, we’ve got somewhere else to go once you’re not hungry anymore.”

The next hour or so of Daiki’s life was mostly a blur, as he began to accept that he hadn’t been listening to someone dying, but something quite different at all, and with that on his mind he found it hard to talk to his favorite uncle or eat the food that was given to him. It kept occurring to him that he was going to have to come face-to-face with the baby he’d convinced himself to hate very soon, and he didn’t want to see that horrible encounter happen, not then or ever. Even with Kaito’s assurance that everything was okay and nothing bad was going to happen, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he was about to learn that he was getting replaced for real, even though his mother had insisted he wasn’t going to be.

Once the lunch was (mostly) eaten and a bag of food was packed to bring with them, the two set off for the hospital, the ride spent with Kaito explaining everything to Daiki as best as he could, given how little he knew for himself. “Maki Roll says they barely made it in time, which means they wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been so brave and great at passing along information,” he said as they turned onto the property. “You really helped your parents out today, and we’re all proud of you for it.”

“What would’ve happened if they didn’t make it in time?” Daiki asked in return, envisioning all sorts of bad things that his rampant imagination was providing for him. “Would Mom have died _then_?”

“No way, your mom is way too strong to let something like that take her out! I don’t know what could have happened but it probably wouldn’t have been pretty, so let’s be thankful you’re already doing a kickass job at being a good big brother.” There was just something about how Kaito always spoke in an inspirational way that put Daiki’s worried heart to ease, even if he was still terrified of what he knew was coming.

After the car was parked and they were inside the building, Kaito was reliant on his phone to direct them to where Maki was waiting for them both. “They got the clearance to let you in right away,” she said, motioning towards Daiki with a hand wave. “The nurses were a bit hesitant to let a kid your age in, but your father and I convinced them to allow it.”

“Why would they have to allow it?” Daiki waited for an answer but Maki didn’t give him one, and Kaito didn’t have one to give either, so he was unfortunately left hanging as they went up floors and down halls in a bustling hospital. He’d never been inside one before so every open door they passed seemed like a gateway to a different dimension, and the various signs with all sorts of names and places felt overwhelming to his mind. At that time, all he wanted was to know where his parents were and that they were okay, and he felt like they were never going to get there with how many turns they had to take.

The door they were looking for was closed, but Maki knocked on it and waited for clearance to open. That wait felt much longer than it really was, the emotions running through Daiki’s mind reaching a fever pitch as he clung tightly to Kaito’s hand, all three of them there watching the door intently. Finally, after some muffled noise on the other side, the door was opened and Kaito let go of Daiki, pushing him forward gently. “You go inside by yourself, bud, we’ll be in soon enough,” he said, making the boy wary of what was waiting for him and why he needed to be first.

Upon entering the room he had the door firmly shut behind him, but he wasn’t even aware of the sound of the thudding door because his focus was entirely on the scene before him. There was his father, sitting as close to the bed as he could, brushing out the tangled ends of Kaede’s hair, while she was looking directly at Daiki with a tired smile. “You made it,” she croaked, trying not to laugh at how the boy stiffened up at the sound of her voice. “I’m glad it didn’t take you too long, there’s someone you need to meet.”

It was the moment that he’d been fearing and looking towards with nothing but animosity for so long, but Daiki came up to the bed, Shuichi pulling him up onto his lap to give him a better look. There in his mother’s arms was a tiny, sleeping, alien-lookalike baby that didn’t seem to have a hair on its head or a care in the world; at once his heart melted and he regretted ever thinking he could hate the child. “That’s your new brother,” Shuichi told him, nuzzling down on the top of Daiki’s head with one cheek. “Aren’t you happy to see him?”

“Y-yeah,’’ Daiki replied, remembering every single thing he’d learned about babies in the past several months and realizing how daunting it was to know that the baby was really real and really in their lives. “Am I gonna get to hold him?”

“Not right now, but maybe later.” Kaede’s grip on the child instinctively tightened at the question, even though the person asking it meant zero harm. “Right now, we’re going to let him sleep, but once he’s awake again maybe you can hold him. But we do have a special thing we want you to do for us, since you were super helpful in getting us here before he was born, if you want to help us again.”

Nodding eagerly, Daiki was ready to take on any task for his parents in that moment, and a short while later he was being sent back out into the hallway, where Kaito and Maki were still waiting to be let inside. “Mom and Dad said you can come in,” he recited, looking over his shoulder at the door that was being held open by Shuichi just in case it tried closing on Daiki. “They said that it’s time for you to get to meet my baby brother Syuzen, because I already got to meet him.”

The _pride_ he felt getting to be the one to announce the baby’s name to his parents’ close friends was not something that he was easily going to replicate. It was just another page in the book that was Daiki’s completely “ordinary” life, one that he was going to get to share with someone ten years younger than him for the rest of forever. But he knew that he was blessed in so many ways after all, and he was going to make sure his baby brother didn’t grow up thinking he wasn’t as special as he really was. After all, what were older siblings meant for, other than being there to love and support and occasionally cause trouble?

**Author's Note:**

> aaaaaaaaaa I went way overboard with writing this but I couldn't resist! I hope everyone reading this likes it as much as I did, I had a blast getting to tap into other cultures for the Momota kids (since they're all adopted) and then, of course, writing a bratty child making his parents' life hell for so long was a fun time! <3


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